EduPlant announces this year's competition winners

on Wednesday, 24 October 2018

EduPlant, South Africa’s leading food gardening and greening programme, held its biennial schools competition in the first week of October this year. Each of the 66 finalist schools competed for the honoured title of Best Permaculture School Garden in the country and, on the afternoon of the prize-giving and gala lunch, over R430 000 worth of prizes were distributed. EduPlant, initiated and managed by Food & Trees for Africa in partnership with The Woolworths Trust, saw an action-packed week of workshops and presentations and ended in roaring success: everyone was a winner!

“Over the past 24 years, EduPlant has gone from strength to strength as a champion of sustainable farming through school-based and cluster workshops,” said Robyn Hills, FTFA Programme Manager. “Awareness and knowledge of nutrition and eco-friendly permaculture farming is built in communities where hunger is an issue for millions of South Africans. As we have seen, at the 2018 EduPlant Finals, these schools’ food gardens supplement feeding schemes while educating learners about climate change, community resilience, healthy environments and natural vegetable production. EduPlant schools are taking effective action for a #ZeroHunger future.”

Each finalist schools received R1,500 in cash on top of educational resources, stationery and seeds. The winning schools in the Provincial category received a gardening tool-set worth R5,000 along with R6000. In the Emerging, Intermediate and Advanced categories, the first prize for each school was R18,000 cash, the second prize was R12,000 cash, and the third prize was R8,000 cash. All the category finalists receive a two-week Permaculture Design Course for the educators. For those schools who won in the Mentoring category, the sought-after title and first prize was R30,000, R15,000 for second place, and R10,000 for third place.

A huge congratulations to all the learners and educators involved. We are very proud of the 2018 EduPlant winners and had a wonderful time celebrating all the finalist schools.